Electrical stimulation of the nervous system has provided a therapeutic treatment for a variety of disorders. For example, electrical stimulation has been applied to pain management, such as by performing stimulation of the spinal cord. Electrical stimulation has also been performed to augment hearing in the context of cochlear implants. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become an established therapy for treating various conditions including, for example, Parkinson's disease and dystonia. DBS has also been employed to treat several other conditions, such as clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and epilepsy to name a few.
By way of further example, the discovery that high frequency DBS generates clinical benefits analogous to those achieved by surgical lesioning has transformed the use of functional neurosurgery for the treatment of movement disorders. In first world countries, thalamic DBS for intractable tremor has replaced ablative lesions of the thalamus, and DBS of the subthalamic nucleus or globus pallidus intemus (GPi). GPi has replaced pallidotomy in the treatment of the cardinal motor features of Parkinson's disease (e.g., tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia). In addition, GPi DBS has emerged as an effective therapy for dystonia, and the utility of DBS is being examined for the treatment of epilepsy, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, and major depression.
Despite the documented clinical successes of neurostimulation, the mechanisms and effects of neurostimulation at the neuronal level remain difficult to predict. As a result, modeling and simulation have played increasingly important roles in the engineering design and scientific analysis of neurostimulation.